Oralität in modernen Schriftkulturen. Untersuchungen zu afrikanischen und deutschsprachigen Erzähltexten (review)

A review of Akila Ahouli's dissertation cannot be meaningful without a brief presentation of the school of thought of which it is a product, and this involves the location of the study of African literatures in departments of German (in other words, in departments of literature) in Germany, for such a location has always been problematic. And here the quest for relevance has its own logic: Germany's very short colonial past in Africa has transformed German, with very few exceptions, into anything but a language of literature on the African continent. This has profound consequences for a division of labor in German academia. Reserved today in Germany to departments of African Studies, with their triple division in language, literature, and history sections, the study of the literatures from the African continent is thus nolens volens removed from the broad field of conversations around literature, even if installed on a triadic of its own. If it is not what Wole Soyinka found it to be during the seventies at Cambridge University, an "exotic beast," it still remains an Orchideewissenschaft¹ on German campuses.

Attempts in Germany, inside departments of German, to redefine a locus for the study of African literatures have a long history, both related to particular scholars and to institutions. Of that institutional history, two main trends may need a special mention here. The first is the intercultural German Studies project (Interkulturelle Germanistik), founded during the eighties at the University of Bayreuth, around Alois Wierlacher. Its main journal is Jahrbuch Deutsch als Fremdsprache, and its research interest, roughly, the relationship between "the Own" and "the Foreign," ranges from investigating appropriations of the German language to the influence of German culture around the world. The project is rooted in linguistics, and methodologically in hermeneutics. The second attempt is the "Hanover School," which was also constituted during the eighties around Léo Kreutzer, as a critique of Wierlacher's project. Welfengarten is its major journal, and its focus on the chronological simultaneity of historically noncontemporaneous (Ungleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen), and on efforts to construct a foreign sight (fremder Blick) to German literature, provides a niche through which African literatures can be analyzed.

Any attempt to summarize these two trends would defy the limits of this review. It may be enough to say that both managed to productively interest the research funds of such organizations as the DAAD and the Humboldt Foundation in the study of contemporary African literatures in Germany. Both could also open the truly Europe-centered departments of German in Germany to Masters and PhD students writing their thesis on writers like Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Wole Soyinka, Mongo Beti, etc., and to endow visiting professorships, through which African scholars could further their research for a Habilitation, lecture, start or continue collaborative works with their German counterparts. The Hanover School has been more successful than the Intercultural German Studies project with regard to the African continent, due mainly to its self-imposed restriction to literature (understood as belles lettres), its commitment to theory, its continuous and sustained relationship with African scholars like David Simo, Alioune Sow, Joseph Gomsu, and Serge Glitho, and its establishment of a special relationship between the University of Hanover and German departments at African universities, particularly at the Universities of Yaoundé, Lomé, Abidjan, and Dakar.

A network of German departments in African universities provides for a parallel and continuous exchange through conferences, while journals like the Etudes Germano-Africaines, Acta Germanica, and Mont Cameroun sustain the production of a knowledge that, for the most part, is published in German, and thus removed from the classical languages of scholarship in African studies. It may be added here that the methodological refashioning of the study of African literatures inside postcolonial studies and cultural studies, formulated mainly in the English-speaking sphere, and particularly in English departments in the UK and the USA, has opened the study of...